Don and others, Watching this list over the past five or six years, it seems to me that there have been some individuals who use the list in a relatively manipulative way. That is, they propose bizarre threads that are intended more to elicit exaggerated responsiveness (lots of replies) and responses (touching "hot buttons"). There may be a tiny bit of social psychological benefit to be gained from watching the interchanges (the process) engendered by such threads, though the content often seems pretty vacuous. The new subscribers to the list, of course, are most prone to be taken in by this sort of manipulative gambit, so the flow waxes and wanes as new folks come on board. The injunction to "use the delete key" then is repeated for the benefit of those new folks. Naturally, some of the older subscribers join in, restating (so far as I can see) hackneyed arguments from older exchanges of the same general ilk. Eventually, the tempest blows over, the original poster gets his/her reinforcing kicks (I guess), the new subscriber learns a couple of valuable lessons (e.g., use the delete key, set up a filtering rule), and the tolerant ones go on being tolerant. The manipulators seem, in most cases, to give up eventually when their attempts to hook the list don't work--nonresponse is still the best response to them. Pat Cabe ************************************************** Patrick Cabe, Ph.D. Department of Psychology University of North Carolina at Pembroke One University Drive Pembroke, NC 28372-1510 (910) 521-6630 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
